NY Times archive is back

Hold your horses

I'm getting tons of email from puzzled readers saying that when they click on the supposedly dead link at the end of Saturday's essay, they get the page, without any request for money. I do too.

It's pretty clear that something changed at the Times in the last 48 hours. No more dead links. I proved it by producing a page of all the citations of the Times on Scripting News in the last six years. A total of 1003 links. Some are broken because I chose the wrong URL to point through, but none are broken due to the archive policy of the Times company.

Bravo. In a world where such victories are few and far between, this one is truly worth savoring. Thanks to the Times for supporting the Web.

I have also received a statement from the BBC in response to Saturday's piece. I want to run that separately, and will do so shortly. Today will be a two-DaveNet day.

Dave Winer

PS: URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It's the address of a page on the Web. It's also the hidden bit of info in an HTML link and that's what makes the Web fundamentally different from all other written media.

PPS: Hold Your Horses is an idiom that means don't rush to a conclusion, we have new information. It's pretty close to Stop The Presses, something often said in movies about newspapers made in the 30s and 40s. A reporter discovers something new that makes the front page wrong. Stop The Presses, let's get the story right. The Web is more fluid. You can't really stop the presses here. But you can cover a story as it evolves.